Each week we post a round-up of some of our most exciting national and international PUP book coverage. Reviews, interviews, events, articles–this is the spot for coverage of all things “PUP books” that took place in the last week. Enjoy!

BirdGenie

Planning your outdoor adventures for the upcoming summer? Picnic baskets, sunscreen — the list of outdoor essentials goes on. But this summer, PUP is adding another item to the list, and you won’t want to leave home without it.

BirdGenie™ is a remarkable app that enables anyone with a supported Apple® or Android® smartphone or tablet to identify birds in the backyard, at the local park, or on the nature trail–all with the tap of a button! It’s like Shazam® for nature–just hold up your phone, record the bird singing, and BirdGenie tells you what bird it is! This summer, PUP will be releasing two apps, each covering a separate region: Backyard Birds East and Backyard Birds West. This week, the apps were featured in Inside Higher Ed, and the article quotes one of the developers, Tom Stephenson, author of The Warbler Guide:

“The one thing about field guides is that the print medium isn’t quite sufficient for the information that you’re trying to relay, but it’s been the only vehicle up until recently. Having a vehicle like an app or an ebook that has multimedia capabilities is not only natural, but really adds a lot value. The song identification app is another step further.”

Each regional app contains eighty vocalization types for sixty bird species, covering almost all of the birds you are likely to encounter. When you hear a singing bird and make a clear recording with your smartphone or tablet, BirdGenie identifies the bird if it is an included species, tells you exactly how confident it is that the identification is correct, and provides audio samples of the bird’s various songs to compare with your own recording, as well as color photos, useful information, and links to further reading. No internet connection is needed, making BirdGenie accessible everywhere you go.

COUNT LIKE AN EGYPTIAN

For those who have mastered — or almost mastered — modern math, we’re traveling back in time to bring you a curve-ball problem. David Reimer’s Count Like an Egyptian provides a fun, hands-on introduction to the intuitive and often-surprising art of ancient Egyptian math. Reimer guides you step-by-step through addition, subtraction, multiplication, and more. He even shows you how fractions and decimals may have been calculated–they technically didn’t exist in the land of the pharaohs. You’ll be counting like an Egyptian in no time, and along the way you’ll learn firsthand how mathematics is an expression of the culture that uses it, and why there’s more to math than rote memorization and bewildering abstraction.

You get the feeling that David Reimer must be a pretty entertaining teacher. An associate professor of mathematics at the College of New Jersey, he has taken on the task of explaining ancient math systems by having you use them. And though it’s not easy, he manages to lead you, step by step, through a hieroglyphic based calculation of how many 10-pesu loaves of bread you can make from seven hekat of grain.

Don’t leave the post just yet, mathematics fans. Our author, Joseph Mazur, wrote a piece for the Guardian this week about the origins of mathematical symbols. His book, Enlightening Symbols, explains the fascinating history behind the development of our mathematical notation system. He shows how symbols were used initially, how one symbol replaced another over time, and how written math was conveyed before and after symbols became widely adopted.

He writes:

A few years ago friends and I were talking about the origins of written music. When the conversation turned to the origins of math symbols, I was surprised to learn that few people knew that almost all maths was written rhetorically before the 16th century, often in metered poetry. Most people think symbols for addition, subtraction or equality had been around long before Euclid wrote his Elements in the first century BCE. No! The original Elements is rhetorical. There are no symbols in Euclid’s works, aside from the letters marking the ends of lines and corners of geometric objects. There are no symbols in any early Arab algebra books. Nor do we find any in early European printed algebra books.

Sometimes it seems as if liberalism is slowly caving in. Western democracies are battered by partisanship and populism. Inequality is undermining social cohesion. Governments are unconvincingly shoring up expensive welfare states that have failed to match their promise. Meanwhile, the running is being made by places such as Turkey, which has an intolerant majority, and China and Russia, where power cannot be contested. “Liberalism” by Edmund Fawcett is not only a gripping piece of intellectual history, it also equips the reader to understand today’s threats—and how they might be withstood.

Check out the review in its entirety. Liberalism was released this spring. In this engrossing history of liberalism–the first in English for many decades–veteran political observer Edmund Fawcett traces the ideals, successes, and failures of this central political tradition through the lives and ideas of a rich cast of European and American thinkers and politicians, from the early nineteenth century to today.

Using a broad idea of liberalism, the book discusses celebrated thinkers from Constant and Mill to Berlin, Hayek, and Rawls, as well as more neglected figures. Its twentieth-century politicians include Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Willy Brandt, but also Hoover, Reagan, and Kohl. The story tracks political liberalism from its beginnings in the 1830s to its long, grudging compromise with democracy, through a golden age after 1945 to the present mood of challenge and doubt.

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